Saturday, March 30, 2013

There is only one way for Stephen Harper -- his way. It's been that way from the beginning. His treatment of the dissident members of his caucus underscores that point yet again. But, Andrew Coyne writes, he can only get his way when the mob rules:

This isn’t a team. It’s a mob: mindless, frightened, without purpose or
direction except what the leader decides, and unquestioning in its
acceptance of whatever the leader decrees. What we have been watching
these past few days is an exercise in raw power politics, designed as
much to humiliate the individual in question as anything else. And let
it be noted that a good many members of Warawa’s “team” were more than
willing to take part.

A significant number of those MP's who Harper slapped down last week have, until now, been members of the mob in good standing:

I don’t want to make the dissenters into heroes. As others have pointed
out, they have been only too willing to run with the pack in the past,
to repeat the same fatuous talking points and otherwise follow
instructions.

Their timorous behaviour in the past has made what happened last week possible. They are a pathetic bunch:

This is what has become of MPs, then — the people we elect to
represent us, the ones who are supposed to give voice to our beliefs and
stand up for our interests. They may not vote, in the vast majority of
cases, except as the leader tells them. They may no longer, as of this
week, bring private member’s bills or motions, except those the leader
accepts. They may not even speak in the House, unless the leader allows.

Pretty
much the only role left to them is to read out statements or questions
written for them in the leader’s office, to parrot talking points on TV
panels, and to jump to their feet at regular intervals to applaud
whatever tedious attack line the leader repeats in Parliament. If they
do all these in perfect obsequiousness, they may be rewarded with a seat
in cabinet, though even these have grown so numerous and thus
inconsequential that most will find themselves with little to do but
ride around in their ministerial cars all day.

Stephen Harper didn't get to where he is without his enablers. But the lesson from last week is that he treats his enablers with the same contempt he treats his enemies. For Stephen Harper, everyone is expendable. He is the Emperor of the North.

Friday, March 29, 2013

The first is governance, an amorphous word that covers everything
from the way a leader wields power to the way a small charity accounts
to its donors. The term encompasses laws, procedures, standards, ethics
and expectations. Its meaning varies with the user. Its criteria are
ever-shifting. Yet politicians, bureaucrats, business executives,
non-profit leaders and pundits use the term as if everyone knows — or
ought to know — what they’re talking about.

But, the truth is, our masters make it mean whatever they want it to mean:

Here is an example: “Concluding an agreement with N.W.T. will be an
important and positive step in the evolution of northern governance.”
The speaker is former aboriginal affairs minister John Duncan, heralding
a yet-to-be announced deal that
would shift responsibility for land use and resource management from
Ottawa to the government of the Northwest Territories. Duncan would not
provide details of the negotiations.

The word lacks context. There are no clues -- no details -- to support meaning. In truth, there is nothing there. The most recent exercise in making something of nothing is the latest Harper budget. In fact, Paul Wells writes, Stephen Harper doesn't do budgets anymore.

Then there is another term -- which the Harper government throws around with abandon -- diligence:

Here is how Julian Fantino,
minister of international co-operation, used it in a recent letter to
the Star. “While I am cognizant of the space limitations in the Toronto
Star, to leave out much of what the Canadian International Development
Agency provided, puts into question Jessica McDiarmid’s due diligence in
representing Canada’s exemplary work in Afghanistan.” The minister was
responding to a story
detailing how $10 billion of the $50 billion Canada spent to build a
dam in Afghanistan went to security contractors facing allegations of
corruption.

He did not refute a
single fact in the story. (Everything was backed up by government
documents obtained through Access to Information). Nor did he challenge
any of the figures. Fantino’s objection was the writer’s focus: she
didn’t present a full picture of Canada’s aid to Afghanistan and didn’t
explain how much good the dam would do.

That kind of publicity
is his job — not hers. Yet by using the term “due diligence,” the
minister was able to insinuate McDiarmid had behaved unprofessionally.

And, finally, there is that term austerity. As used by conservative politicians, it is supposed to be a virtue. David Cameron claims that what the world needs is more austerity. Yet austerity, as he defines it, has put his nation into recession for a second time. And it keeps Europe on the brink of economic collapse.

George Orwell knew that politicians twisted language. War became Peace. Ignorance became Strength. And Freedom became Slavery. Not much has changed since he wrote Politics And The English Language.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

This week's revolt in the Conservative caucus has exposed the government's fault lines. Tom Walkom writes that the Harper Party is split three ways:

Over the past eight days, three of those factional fault lines have emerged into full public view. The first is economic.
Some Conservatives are true market zealots who view any interference
with the workings of demand and supply as anathema.

It was these
Conservatives that Small Business Minister Maxime Bernier was speaking
to last week when he publicly chastised Finance Minister Jim Flaherty
for asking mortgage lender Manulife Financial to raise its
bargain-basement rates.

The second great fault line in the party is moral. On one side are
social conservatives. These tend to be anti-abortion, suspicious of gay
marriage and favourable to capital punishment.

Harper himself has always been uncomfortable with social conservatives.
But in the past he managed to keep them on side — partly by emphasizing
law and order and partly by promoting what he has called a moral foreign
policy.

The third great
fissure is over populism. Harper makes no secret of his distaste for
populists. He has argued that a political party that panders to the whim
of voters ends up standing for nothing.

Yet the Reform Party
that eventually became the Harper Conservatives was very much a populist
movement, one that believed MPs had a duty to represent the interests
of their constituents over the diktats of party brass.

Harper is a dictator. However, his government -- like most Canadian conservative governments -- is inherently unstable. Up until now, he has been able to convince the three wings of his caucus to bide their time. But, clearly, the natives are restless.

John Diefenbaker's caucus imploded. So did Brian Mulroney's. Joe Clark wasn't around long enough for things to fall apart. But fall apart they will. The only question is whether or not Stephen Harper will be around when they do. My bet is that the man who prorogued parliament twice rather than face defeat will head for the exits before the cataclysm -- leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Edward Greenspon -- who edited the Globe and Mail before it became a cheerleader for the Harper government -- occasionally writes a column for his new employer, The Toronto Star. On Monday he wrote:

I've been giving some thought in recent days to the term public servant.
It contains within it an elegant and necessary tension. For the
“public” half or the “servant” half to be accorded undue weight skews
the proper functioning of the kind of permanent, non-partisan public
service that characterizes Westminster-style systems like Canada's.

The problem is that the Harperites have put the emphasis on "servant" and erased the notion of "public." Consider the case of Kevin Page:

Whatever its nature,
the government's attack on an office it created for the simple reason of
it having become an inconvenient check speaks to the propensity of the
executive to want to tilt the balance toward servants. Efforts to defang
the PBO are especially disturbing when others in the traditional ranks
of government appear increasingly constrained (economists, scientists,
diplomats) in the information they are allowed to provide the public.
The legislature is a representative extension of the people; it requires
the tools to meet its institutional responsibilities.

In recent days, we
have also seen the odd attempt to shift the balance from public to
servant of government librarians and archivists. Who would have thought
this particular class of quiet professionals could pose a danger, but
some of their activities have been described in a new Code of Conduct as
high risk. What are these activities, you may wonder? Teaching,
attending conferences, speaking in public - even in personal time.
Though it's hard to imagine them being privy to any governmental
secrets, they must seek permission up the ladder before engaging in any
of these high risk activities. They are, after all, servants.

The Harperites came to power knowing they are a minority. They now possess a majority of seats in the House of Commons. But they are painfully aware that those seats were won -- while skirting Canada's election laws -- with a minority of votes.

The greater Canadian public is still against them. They live in fear that the public is waiting to take its revenge. Therefore, they cannot afford to have "public" servants. That is why Linda Keen, Pat Strogan, Munir Sheikh, and now Kevin Page are no longer around.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

The late Edward R. Murrow understood the great potential of television. He also understood that it could merely propagate ignorance. In 1958, he told the Radio and Television News Directors Association:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even
inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined
to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a
box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against
ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”

He would not have been happy with the job done by television journalists in the run up to the Iraq War. Television news died, Chris Hedges writes, as the United Stated prepared to invade Iraq:

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The
descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane,
into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which
hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat
celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when
commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing
entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to
become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC
took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for
war in Iraq.

Now television news has become part of the corporate juggernaut:

The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who
bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate
script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate
state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants
championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of
corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our
dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans
are not corporate pawns.

And it's not what TV news reports that's the real problem. It's what it doesn't report:

The lie of omission is still a lie. It is what these news celebrities do
not mention that exposes their complicity with corporate power. They do
not speak about Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act,
a provision that allows the government to use the military to hold U.S.
citizens and strip them of due process. They do not decry the trashing
of our most basic civil liberties, allowing acts such as warrantless
wiretapping and executive orders for the assassination of U.S. citizens.
They do not devote significant time to climate scientists to explain
the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not confront the
reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. They very
rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban and
rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street.

And so viewers sit in self satisfied somnolence, content in their bondage. The man who challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy understood what mischief could be managed while the people slept. "A nation of sheep," he said, "will beget a government of wolves."

Monday, March 25, 2013

Michael Harris writes this morning that his support for native issues is meeting some strong resistance:

Consider this response to my last column on aboriginal issues, which
predicted that unless the federal government abandons the status quo,
there will be big trouble in the land of peace, order and good
government — and sooner rather than later:

“What you fail to grasp Michael is the widespread support Harper has
amongst the white majority in Canada regarding the natives. The vast
majority of Canadian whites are fed up with the natives. The natives may
be fed up with us as well. However, that doesn’t matter, we have the
population, the money and the guns.”

Recent polls suggest that the commenter isn't alone:

A recent Ipsos-Reid poll
found that 81 per cent of Canadians were against more funding for
aboriginals unless the monies were strictly audited; 66 per cent
believed that natives already receive enough funding; and 60 per cent
thought that aboriginals have brought their problems down on themselves.

So, if Stephen Harper continues to treat Canada's First Nations with disdain, he would appear to have white Canadians on his side.

But, as I read the reaction to Harris' last column, I was reminded of a meeting I attended forty-five years ago. I was a young student teacher, a rube from Canada, preparing to enter the public schools of North Carolina. We neophytes met with a group of young black activists. For three summers American cities like Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington had burned. One of our number suggested the African Americans were hopelessly out numbered. "There are 280 million of us," he said, "and only 22 million of you. And we have the guns."

I have always remembered her response. "Shit," she said. "I'd rather die standing up than on my knees." You could see the storm coming before it broke.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Environmental and fishery laws, our international reputation, the
integrity of Parliament, relations with the provinces, and more, have
been junked; scientists have been gagged, information snuffed under a
pall of non-transparency, and so forth. Virtually every week, for years
now, there’s been a new outrage; they have become so routine that
they’re hardly reported.

And, from the perspective of a Maritimer, Harper's "reform" of EI really means the destruction of the system:

As of now, by some calculations, only four out of 10 people who pay into
the system can actually collect, thanks to its accumulated dysfunction.
If so, the present changes, in my estimation, will drop that to 30 or
even 20 per cent. Much has been said about having to take any job within
an hour’s drive and the inspectors going around sniffing out fraud.
More to the point is the closure of the regional EI offices and the
demand that everything be done by computer, including being on standby
as Ottawa emails twice a day on job openings “in your area.” Meanwhile,
the conditions to be met (competency evaluations, attending job fairs,
networking and others) are geared to big city conditions.

Canadians may have forgotten that

these changes, like everything else in the Harpersphere, were never
debated. They were part of last year’s budget omnibus bill, a violation
of democratic process in itself. The argument that EI is a support for
seasonal industries, not unlike subsidies for the auto or oil
industries, never entered the calculation.

Perhaps, Surette suggests, the prime minister believes he doesn't need the Maritimes -- just as he doesn't need Quebec -- to win the the next time around. Those regions are disposable. In fact, if he only needs 39% of the vote to win, that means the majority of Canadians are disposable.

Given those kinds of numbers, Surette writes:

The real point now, I suggest, is how much damage is yet to be done by
this government before its number is finally up in a couple of years.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Jim Flaherty's budget is an extraordinary feat of legerdemain. He boldly claims there are things in it which simply aren't there. Take his claim that his government will invest in infrastructure. David Macdonald, at The Progressive Economics Forum, writes:

One the most amazing things about this budget is that one of its three
focuses will actually be the opposite of what it’s touting. You’ll
likely hear that $14 billion will be spent on infrastructure over the
next 10 years (actually you may hear much bigger numbers but they just
re-announce existing programs like the gas tax transfer). What you
won’t hear is that 75% of that money is going to spent on or after
2020. In fact, there will be an affective $1 billion cut to
infrastructure transfers to the cities in 2014-15.

There are at least two good arguments for investing in infrastructure. The first is that it improves national productivity. The second is that it acts as an economic stabilizer which injects money into a floundering economy. But, as economic growth is slowing, Mr. Flaherty will cut infrastructure spending next year. Now you see it. Now you don't.

And then there is Flaherty's proposed Canada Job Grant. Tom Walkom writes that it is actually Flaherty's "dirty little secret:"

And while Flaherty
wants business to chip in $5,000 per worker as well, his scheme remains
very much dependent on public largesse.

However, aside from a
few vague mutterings, the Conservative government does not seem prepared
to seriously scale back temporary worker programs that allow business
to cherry-pick cheap labour from abroad.

If companies knew they
couldn’t import, say, skilled pipefitters from Europe, they might put
more effort into training domestic workers to meet their needs.

But employers know
they don’t have to train. Instead, they need only wait until the last
minute and then complain of labour shortages.

Canada has always imported workers. Immigration built this country. The difference now is that, under the Harper government, the workers must be paid 15% less than the going rate -- and then go home. The rule used to be that, when we imported workers, we offered them citizenship.

The Harper government has always been rooted in cynicism. This week's budget was another case in point. Our masters really believe we're stupid.

Friday, March 22, 2013

"The modern conservative," John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, "is engaged in one of man's
oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior
moral justification for selfishness." He might have added that modern conservatives take extreme measures to hide that exercise.That is why, in yesterday's budget speech, Jim Flaherty didn't mention that CIDA was being folded into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nor did he mention the change in the agency's mission. CIDA will now tie foreign aid to Canadian business development abroad. Aid will not be given on the basis of need. It will be given on a simple criterion: leveraging Canadian corporate profits.Tonda MacCharles writes in the Toronto Star that:

The budget plan says
the Conservative government will continue “to make international
development and humanitarian assistance central to our foreign policy”
and that “core development assistance will remain intact.”

But non-governmental
organizations like Oxfam raised concerns that Ottawa’s allocation of aid
“will be driven by Canada’s self-interest in foreign policy, and the
government’s economic and trade agenda rather than poverty alleviation.”

“Foreign Affairs is
not in the business of reducing poverty,” said Anthony Scoggins, Oxfam’s
director of international programs. “We risk losing the expertise,
focus, effectiveness — and results — that CIDA staff brought to this
goal.”

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Jim Flaherty's lecture to Manulife caused the company to reverse its mortgage rate -- and it caused a kerfuffle in the Conservative chorus. Mad Max Bernier publicly disagreed with his cabinet colleague. Even Stephen Harper's favourite economist -- Jack Mintz -- says that mortgage rates are not Flaherty's business.

What Flaherty's intervention showed us is what we have known for a long time. The prime directive in the Harper government is, "Do As I Say." This is the government that has told native peoples that pipelines will cross their land. If they disagree, they will lose their federal funding. This is the government which has told the premiers what they will receive for health care, and which refuses to meet with the Council of the Federation to discuss it. And this is the government which lectures the rest of the world on how it should manage its finances.

The problem, of course, is that lecturers should practise what they preach. On that score, Andrew Coyne writes, Flaherty is no paragon of fiscal virtue:

But then, as long as we’re talking about bad credit: Is it not just a
little galling, having to listen to lectures on the evils of too much
debt, from the man responsible for adding $150-billion to the national
mortgage?

But it's all part of a pattern. This is the government whose first piece of legislation was the Accountability Act -- and which has done everything in its power to avoid accountability -- from refusing to make spending plans public to proroguing parliament.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Truth is always the first casualty of war. But, on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Richard Gwyn writes that truth died before that war started:

In Bush’s version of
the maxim, it wasn’t the fact every war once begun makes lying
inevitable: each side always blames the other, minimizes its own
misdeeds and claims that God is on its side.

Instead, the purpose
of these lies was to manufacture a war that otherwise couldn’t have
happened. As a result, there was no limit to the lying.

And George Bush told some whoppers. He claimed:

That Iraq had an armoury of nuclear weapons. It had none.

That Iraq provided Al Qaeda with the base it needed to stage its terrorist attacks. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq.

That the invasion, by
deposing the dictator Saddam Hussein and bringing him to justice, would
make Iraq a democracy. Today, elections are indeed held, but the
killings continue (nine Iraqis were killed on Monday) and the Sunnis,
Shiites and Kurds are as far apart as ever.

Newspapers like the Great Gray Lady -- The New York Times -- bought the lies. Gywn admits that, for awhile, he bought them, too. So did that august public intellectual, Michael Ignatieff. Things did not work out so well for him.

But, for the Leader of the Opposition, Fortune smiled. Stephen Harper wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Canada's refusal to join the Coalition of the Willing was "a serious mistake" and that disarming Iraq was "necessary for the long term security of the world."

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The Harperites -- not surprisingly -- accused Thomas Mulcair of traitorous behaviour when, during his recent Washinton gambit, he did not give his full throated support to the Keystone XL pipeline. He was, they said, damaging Canada's international reputation.

But four of Canada's former prime ministers have recently suggested that Stephen Harper is doing a superb job of trashing our international reputation without any help from Mulcair. Consider Jean Chretien's terse comment:

"I'm travelling the world. The image of Canada today is not what it was," Chrétien told Global News on Sunday.

Then we have Paul Martin's assessment:

Paul Martin said that Canada was no longer "well-positioned" to be a player on the international stage and put the blame on Harper.

"[The United Nations is] going to be looking for countries that have a role to play internationally," he told Postmedia.

"Well, if you have walked away from Africa, if you have walked away
from climate change, you’re not going to have a great deal of influence
in the rest of the world."

The bad reviews, however, don't just from former Liberal prime ministers. The most stinging assessment comes from Joe Clark. He says that Harper has abandoned the "strong and positive traditions" which were the bedrock of the old Progressive Conservative Party:

"It's certainly clear in international affairs, where its focus has
been very narrow on the military and on trade," he [told] the
McGill Daily.

"Much of the emphasis upon CIDA, which had been upon actual
development dealing with poverty, has been replaced now by a supportive
role [in] trade arrangements, not necessarily in the poorest countries.

"Our relations with many parts of the world where we had historically strong partnerships have deteriorated."

Even Kim Campbell opined that, "We have pulled back a little from our effort to be serious players, and I’d like to see us do more."

Clark and Campbell were Progressive Conservatives. The first thing Harper did when he assumed the leadership of his "new" party was to drop the first adjective. As Stephen Harper stands naked before the world, it's obvious that there is nothing progressive about the man.

Monday, March 18, 2013

We hear that Ontario's ongoing dispute with teachers is about extra curricular activities and the deficit. It's about neither. Tom Walkom writes in the Toronto Star:

At its heart, this
fight is about work. It is about the implicit deal struck between
governments, employers and employees more than 50 years ago to make the
workplace a fairer place.

It is about the unravelling of that deal.

Fifty years ago, a carefully constructed set of rules applied to labour negotiations:

Ontario’s law
established criteria under which unions could organize a workplace.
Employers, in turn were required to at least talk to a union that had
met this threshold.

Each side was allowed
to use the ultimate sanction, a work stoppage. A union could strike. An
employer could, by locking out its employees, bar them from working.

But there were rules
to this game. Bargaining had to be conducted in good faith. Strikes and
lock-outs could take place only when a collective agreement had lapsed. A
government board was established to act as umpire.

Employees deemed
essential, such as nurses and police officers, were barred from
striking. In return, decisions on their wages and working conditions
were set by neutral arbitrators.

Throughout, the
legislature always retained the right to end, through back-to-work laws,
any labour dispute it deemed harmful. In virtually all such cases,
though, those ordered back to work received wages and benefits decided
by a neutral arbitrator.

But, last year, the McGuinty government trashed that system. The man who billed himself as "The Education Premier" decided that Ontarians could no longer afford the rules:

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Several years ago, the American educator Henry Giroux moved to Canada to take the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. From there he has continued to write about the land of his birth. His criticisms have been clear-eyed and stark. Writing yesterday about Paul Ryan's proposed budget, Giroux had this to say:

It is a story that embodies a kind of savage violence that makes clear
that those who occupy the bottom rungs of American society - whether
they be low-income families, poor minorities of color and class or young
failed consumers - are to be considered disposable, removed from
ethical considerations and the grammar of human suffering.

Giroux then expands on Ryan's -- and the Republican Party's -- notion of the disposable citizen:

At the heart of this account is an ideology, a mode of governance, and a
set of policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a distorted
notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ state violence to
suppress dissent and to abandon those suffering from a collection of
social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness to
homelessness. In the end, this is a story about disposability and how it
has become a central feature of American politics. Rather than work for
a better life, most Americans now work to simply survive in a
survival-of-the-fittest society in which a growing number of groups are
considered disposable and a drain on the body politic, economy, and
sensibilities of the rich and powerful. What is new about the politics
of disposability is not that public values and certain groups are now
rendered as excess or redundant, but the ways in which such
anti-democratic practices have become normalized in the existing
contemporary neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless
power disparities is now matched by a culture of cruelty soaked in
blood, humiliation and misery. Private injuries are not only separated
from public considerations in Ryan’s story, they have become the object
of scorn just as all noncommercial public spheres are viewed with
contempt, a perfect supplement to a chilling indifference to the plight
of those disadvantaged because of their class, health, race, age and
disability. There is a particularly savage violence that fuels Ryan’s
account and that violence has made America unrecognizable as a
democracy.

What is truly chilling is how many people have bought Ryan's story. Canadians, by the way, are in no position to feel a sense of schadenfreude. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is implementing the same agenda north of the border. For both Ryan and Harper, citizens are disposable.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Stephen Harper must feel he has dodged a bullet. Theresa Spence has left the island; and all appears calm along the banks of the Ottawa River. Now, as he did with the premiers on healthcare, Harper is dictating terms to Canada's First Nations. Michael Harris writes:

Senior Idle No More sources have told iPolitics that bands are in
turmoil over a debate about whether to sign this year’s contribution
agreements with the federal government. The issue is an appendix of
conditions attached to the documents.

The appendix allegedly requires the bands to support federal omnibus
legislation and proposed resource developments as a condition of
accessing their funding. Some bands have already signed the funding
agreements out of necessity, noting that they did so under duress, and
at least two others allegedly did not. “As of April 1, 2013,” one source
said, “they will have no funds because they did not sign the
agreement.”

As has been the case all along, Harper wants to turn back the clock. Former Prime Minister Paul Martin, who watched Harper tear up the Kelonwa Accord, says:

“The great tragedy of Kelowna is that the fundamental problem has only
gotten worse as Harper has gone back to the old way of doing things that
has been failing since the 1920s … There is great tension now because
the Harper government has reversed wheels on the issue.”

Consider what has happened since Harper burned the accord:

Two of the key people Harper once depended on to guide him through
the issues on the table with Canada’s First Nations, Senator Patrick
Brazeau and former political mentor Tom Flanagan, are in disgrace.

The high level meetings that were supposed to jump-start the new relationship are still just a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye.

The Harper government has taken the Metis to court to argue that
Ottawa is not responsible for them after a lower court ruled that it
was.

The Harper government fought a case in the federal Court of Appeal
to sustain the current system of child welfare underfunding on reserves.

The Harper government has been taken to court for refusing to
provide documents by its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission looking
into the residential school tragedy.

Canada's First Nations have learned what Quebecers learned early into Harper's tenure: When he says he has their interests at heart, he is totally insincere. What drives Idle No More is the movement's totally accurate take on the prime minister. You can't believe a word he says.

And that is the reason why, if Harper thinks he has put native unrest to rest, he is sadly mistaken. Aboriginal anger continues to grow.

Friday, March 15, 2013

When Hugo Chavez died last week, Stephen Harper said, “At this key juncture, I hope the people of Venezuela can now build for
themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom,
democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights.” Mr. Harper likes to lecture the world on the meaning of democracy.

But the Toronto Star reports that, among the world's scientists, Canada's lectures ring hollow. They know that when it comes to freedom of speech -- one of the cornerstones of democracy -- Canada is full of hot air:

But one researcher
with well over a decade of experience in the civil service, who asked to
remain anonymous because he said both management and his union have
told him he could face penalties for speaking out publicly, called the
situation “absolutely embarrassing.”

“All of my colleagues
around the world know about this, and they simply can’t understand what
is going on in Canada,” the scientist said.

And the people who populate our newsrooms also know what is going on:

Newsrooms nationwide
are familiar with the unusual restrictions Canadian government
scientists face when attempting to communicate their work.

For a story last
December on how climate change is affecting the Arctic and Antarctic,
The Star contacted scientists at NASA, Environment Canada and Natural
Resources Canada.

Emails to the U.S.
government scientists were personally returned, usually the same day and
with offers to talk in person or by phone.

Emails sent to
Canadian government scientists led to apologetic responses that the
request would have to be routed through public relations officials.
Public relations staff asked for a list of questions in advance, and
then set boundaries for what subjects the interview could touch upon.
Approval to interview the scientists was given days later. In all cases,
a PR staffer asked to listen in on the interviews.

Federal Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault is about to take up the issue. Like Kevin Page, the retiring Parliaamentary Budget Officer, she will probably get no cooperation from the Harper government. But this story has moved beyond Canada. And you can bet there are sources outside this country who will give Legault and earful.

The rest of the world is beginning to cotton on to how things work in The Land of the Muzzled.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

For thirty years, neo-conservatives have been selling a myth. From Ronald Reagan, through George W. Bush to Stephen Harper, they have pitched the idea that they know how to manage government finances. Berating the "tax and spend" heresy of a previous generation, they have claimed that they will lead their fellow citizens to the Promised Land.

The problem is that facts invariably prove them wrong. The latest example of conservative bunk is the recently released Alberta budget. Alberta -- the Land of Milk and Honey -- will be running a deficit this year.

It's not all Alison Redford's fault. Albertans have been raiding the Heritage Fund for decades. Frances Russell writes:

Alberta has deposited just 5.4 per cent of its resource revenues in the
fund since its inception, a fact that has gone largely unnoticed by the
province’s population. Almost all the money was spent helping successive
Conservative governments party hearty on above-Canadian-average levels
of public services while boasting long and loud about Alberta’s status
as the nation’s lowest-tax jurisdiction. Albertans not only don’t pay a
sales tax but also enjoy a flat income tax, the latter another gift from
the ebullient [Ralph] Klein and his provincial treasurer, former Canadian
Alliance leader Stockwell Day.

That's certainly not what the late Peter Lougheed intended when he established the fund. Its purpose was to “provide prudent stewardship of the savings from Alberta’s
non-renewable resources by providing the greatest financial returns on
those savings for current and future generations of Albertans." But those who followed Lougheed disregarded that mission.

According to a report recently released by the Fraser Institute:

From 1977 to 2011, the Alberta Heritage Fund’s cumulative net income was
$31.3 billion. But the amount transferred out of the fund was $29.6
billion — “meaning virtually nothing was set aside for
inflation-proofing to keep the principal intact in real terms,” the
report’s authors say. “Despite Alberta’s tremendous natural resource
endowment, the Fund equity (valued at cost) as of 2011 was a mere $14.2
billion.”

The Norwegian Ministry of Finance forecasts that the fund will reach NOK
4.3 trillion ($717 billion) by the end of 2014 and NOK 6 trillion
($1 trillion) by the end of 2019.[4]
In a parliamentary white paper in April 2011 the Norwegian Ministry of
Finance forecast that the 2030 value of the fund would be NOK 7.4
trillion ($1.3 trillion). A worst-case scenario for the fund value in
2030 was forecast at NOK 2.7 trillion ($455 billion) and a best case
scenario at NOK 19.6 trillion ($3.3 trillion).[5]

It's truly amazing that conservatives are still selling this snake oil. But what is more amazing is that so many people are still buying it.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Lawrence Martin wrote in yesterday's Globe and Mail that those who predicted Justin Trudeau would be this decade's Kim Campbell may yet live to eat crow:

When the poll numbers first came out last fall showing that Liberals
led by Mr. Trudeau would beat all comers, no one took the numbers
seriously. It was name recognition stuff. Voters weren’t paying
attention. No big deal. In the ensuing months came the same polls and
the same understandably dismissive reactions.

But now there’s been
about half a year of it, and Mr. Trudeau has made some mistakes and he
hasn’t put forward innovative policy. But his fantastically good numbers
still stand.

Being a soothsayer is a difficult business. Nine times out of ten, you're wrong. But there is still one axiom about Canadian politics which remains true:

The big story of Canadian politics is its consistent pattern. Canadians
generally hold to moderate values and vote pragmatically. They throw
parties out and they bring them back when they get tired of their
alternative.

While Justin's future is murky, the Conservative present is dim. The economy is stagnating. Those Conservative senate appointments are beginning to smell like fresh manure. And the F-35 debacle has blown a hole in Stephen Harper's claims that he and his confreres are paragons of fiscal virtue.

The truth is that governments eventually do themselves. Despite all of its preening, the Harper government is beginning to look tired and fat. Martin may well be correct in his contention that:

Those who say Justin Trudeau is nothing special are probably right. He
hasn’t shown much. But what the soundings suggest is that it may well be
he doesn’t have to show much. It may well be he need only present a
decent alternative and let Canadian politics – which is about
dissatisfaction with incumbents more than excitement with new faces –
run its course.

Like Nathan Cullen in the NDP race last year, [Joyce] Murray has presented a
credible progressive version of her party’s traditions while also
arguing for party cooperation. And she’s attracted significant support —
even though leadership races are when party supporters are at their
most partisan.

Of course, we all know she won’t actually win.

The old ways die hard. And co-operation does not appear on either party's radar screen. That said,

there is a very slight possibility that there will be yet another
opening to the idea before the 2015 election. If the Conservatives were
to start polling quite a bit stronger — say nearer the 40 per cent mark —
and the Liberal and the NDP were deadlocked in the mid-20 per cent
range for long enough, there might be internal and external pressures
for Trudeau and Mulcair to temper their intransigence about cooperation.

Regardless of polls, the first step in a progressive restoration is for the Liberals and the NDP to stop firing at each other:

A good starting point would be to look at the agreement signed by Jack
Layton and Stéphane Dion when they tried to dislodge the Harper
Conservatives in 2008. That would at least get the parties working
together instead of against each other.

The Liberals and the Dippers don't have to re-invent the wheel. But they do need to realize that, rather than one party co-opting the other -- which was what happened when the Reform Party captured the old Progressive Conservatives -- they have to come to some detente.

Stephen Harper is betting that they won't. And, so far, his bet has paid off.

Monday, March 11, 2013

After attending the 1993 Reform Party Convention, the late Dalton Camp wrote:

"The speechifying gives off acrid whiffs of xenophobia, homophobia, and
paranoia—like an exhaust—in which it seems clear both orator and
audience have been seized by some private terror: immigrants, lesbians,
people out of work or from out of town and criminals."

The people who support Manning and his star pupil -- the Prime Minister of Canada -- still believe the same swill. If you doubt that, remember that the keynote speaker at this year's Manning Conference was Dr. Ron Paul. Besides being a former presidential candidate, Paul has left a long paper trail. Francis Russell reminds her readers of some of the gems contained in that pile of verbiage:

Speaking
at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the John Birch Society, Paul
said the society was “a great patriotic organization featuring an
educational program solidly based on constitutional principles … Anyone
who has been in the trenches over the years battling on any of the major
issues — whether it’s pro-life, gun rights, property rights, taxes,
government spending, regulation, national security, privacy, national
sovereignty, the United Nations, foreign aid — knows that members of the
John Birch Society are always in there doing the heavy lifting.”

That would be the same John Birch Society which claimed that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist agent. And then there was Paul's reaction to the Rodney King Affair:

The Ron Paul Political Report,
published an editorial in June, 1992 in the wake of the Rodney King
riots in Los Angeles. It suggested that the looting and rioting was an
inevitable consequence of the federal government providing blacks with
“civil rights quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for
government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black
bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black TV shows,
black TV anchors, hate-crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone
who dares question the black agenda … Order was only restored in L.A.
when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare cheques three
days after rioting began.”

The editorial was entirely consistent with Paul's statement that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act because "government should not dictate how property owners behave."

Then there was the problem of some of Paul's supporters, people like former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, David Duke. When Duke threw his support behind Paul, David Frum wrote:

“Paul has just gained David Duke’s endorsement. This week, the former
KKK Grand Wizard telephoned into the radio show hosted by Stormfront
founder Don Black to announce his support … Mr. Black is a former
Klansman and member of the American Nazi Party who founded the ‘white
nationalist’ website Stormfront in 1995. He donated to Mr. Paul in 2007
and has been photographed with the candidate …

Paul was the man Preston Manning chose to keynote his conference. I note that Manning is an unapologetic Christian.

Friday, March 08, 2013

Howard Sapers, the ombudsman for Corrections Canada, released a report yesterday on the aboriginal population in this nation's prisons. His findings should disturb all Canadians, native and non-native. The lead editorial in today's Toronto Starrepeats some of Sapers' findings:

Sapers points out that the 3,400 First Nations, Metis and Inuit
prisoners in federal prisons account for 23 per cent of inmates, up from
17 per cent a decade ago, even though aboriginals are just 4 per cent
of the general population. And the trend shows no sign of abating any
time soon.

While Canadian law provides for native communities to take custody of
offenders in Healing Lodges, far too few inmates qualify, barely one in
10, and there are too few lodges to house any more. Correctional Service
Canada and native communities run eight lodges, with fewer than 300
spaces. And there are none at all in Ontario, British Columbia, the
Atlantic provinces or the North. As a consequence there has been no
progress in closing the large rehabilitation and reintegration gap
between aboriginal and non-aboriginal offenders.

In fact, the gap has grown -- a gap that is mirrored in the staffing of Canada's prisons:

He also notes that of the federal system’s 19,000 staff, just 12 are
aboriginal community development officers tasked with planning
prisoners’ release into the wider community.

Sapers gives the details on Stephen Harper's "tough on crime" agenda. Like Kevin Page and Michael Ferguson, he exposes the lie behind the rhetoric. When the prime minister talks about being "tough on crime" he really means "imprisoning the disadvantaged."

A quick note: My wife and I will be away for a couple of days. I'll be back at the beginning of next week. Spring is on the way!

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Under Harper, the First Ministers no longer gather and the unsolicited input of the premiers usually falls on deaf ears.

The adoption without
compensation to the provinces of a potentially costly law-and-order
agenda; the imposition of a new funding formula for medicare and the
implementation of an EI reform that stands to transform the seasonal
economies of parts of Quebec and Atlantic Canada are all cases in point.

Now Harper proposes to claw back funds that are used by the provinces for job training. There has been no discussion about the proposal. The prime minister conveniently ignores the fact that Canada -- from the very beginning -- has been a federation. The concept implies co-operation between constituent parts. But, Hebert writes,

In a previous life Stephen Harper advocated the creation of a provincial
firewall to shelter Alberta from the policies of the federal government
of the day. The concept must have stuck with him. As prime minister, he
has presided over the building of an increasingly thick firewall to
insulate his government from the input of the provinces.

Not only does he ignore the founding fathers, he also ignores recent Canadian history. He assumes that Quebec will live quietly in its own parallel universe, even as he gives Pauline Marois the ammunition she needs to argue for Quebec's independence:

But this comes at a
sensitive juncture — with the Parti Québécois in power but also against
at a time when a major backlash against the latest EI reform has been gathering steam.

The issue is gaining
traction weekly in Quebec and mobilizing opponents right across the
political spectrum in a way not seen since the 2008 culture cuts.

In the House of
Commons on Monday, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion read out a list
of former Quebec Conservative candidates who have added their voices to
the chorus that is calling on the government to rethink its EI reform.

Atlantic Canadians are as infuriated as Quebecers by Harper's EI reforms. Just as the prime minister didn't foresee the meltdown of 2008, he doesn't see the perfect storm which is headed his way.

Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Jim Flaherty dances to Stephen Harper's tune. Flaherty, after all, is merely a lawyer. Harper likes to remind everyone that he possesses a master's degree from the University of Calgary. And, during the last election, he promised Canadians that his government would balance the budget by 2015.

A real economist knows that, in a world dominated by economic uncertainty, making that kind of a promise is economic folly. That is why Harper and Flaherty have taken such pains to make sure that Parliament and the public do not and cannot know the state of the nation's finances. The National Post reports that, in this month'sInside Policy, former finance department officials Scott Clark and Peter Devries write:

During the 2006 election, the Conservative Party promised greater
transparency and accountability in budget planning,Unfortunately, this has not turned out to be the case. Budget documents now contain less economic and fiscal data than in any budget over the previous twenty-five years. For some reason the [finance] minister seems more intent on not
providing the public with information, rather than engaging Canadians in
discussion on critical policy issues.

We live in a culture where either the baldfaced lie -- think Lance Armstrong -- or the cover up -- think Richard Nixon -- have paved the way to success. Harper learned more from Richard Nixon than he did from Lance Armstrong -- although Harper's recent defence of Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin suggest that he has been taking advice from Armstrong.

The budget process, like the government itself, is completely devoid of integrity:

Detailed annual spending estimates are now introduced in Parliament
before a budget, making them less accurate and leading to a situation
where MPs don’t really know what they are doing when they vote to
approve expenditures worth billions of dollars.

In the 2006 election, the Tories promised to create a parliamentary
budget office. But once in office, they refused to provide the PBO with
the data it needs, and have attacked its leader, Kevin Page.

For his 2012 budget, Flaherty introduced two controversial “omnibus
bills” that were each several hundred pages long and contained policy
changes which critics said had nothing to do with the budget. Flaherty
was accused of trying to jam contentious changes throughout without
sufficient review by MPs.

With Page set to retire at the end of the month, the Harperites will be sure to make the PBO their mouthpiece. The numbers will be what they say they are.

A real economist deals with real numbers. Apparently, possessing an economics degree from the University of Calgary doesn't make you a real economist

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Power itself has profound, and usually toxic, effects on those who have
it. CEOs are so pampered that comparing them to babies is surprisingly
illuminating. What is true for a CEO is, in this case, even more true
for the men and women who lead nations and can literally have power over
life and death. Over time this authority is likely to have profound
effects on most people’s personalities. It would be remarkable indeed
for any person treated with deference and pampering for years, even
decades, to not be affected by it.

Lord Acton's maxim still holds true. Power corrupts. And the longer one has it, the more it can corrupt. However, as the current Senate controversy suggests, you don't have to be in power long to be corrupted. More importantly, while youth usually has vigor, it does not always possess wisdom. As proof, I offer the Honourable Pierre Polievre, who has a lot to say, but who says very little that is either useful or wise.

Polievre thinks in terms of categories, not people. He -- like so many of us -- has forgotten what Atticus Finch taught Scout:

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his
point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

To Kill A Mockingbird is all about walking around in someone else's skin -- not just the martyred Tom Robinson's or the feared Boo Radley's, but also the tragically ignorant Mayella Ewell's.

What matters is not whether a person is too old or too young. What matters is whether or not he or she is too rigid. Getting inside someone's skin teaches us to think beyond categories and stereotypes. We learn to see the infinite variety in nature and not to fear people who are not like us.

And, finally, we come to the realization that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Monday, March 04, 2013

The United Nations right-to-food envoy says the Harper government's
controversial decisions to scrap the long-form census and negotiate a
free trade deal with Europe will make it more difficult to fight poverty
in Canada.

Those are among the many cutting observations made by
Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations' special rapporteur on the right
to food, who will release his report Monday in Geneva at a meeting of
the UN Human Rights Council.

In a twenty-one page report, De Shutter:

calls on Ottawa to create a national food strategy to fight hunger among
a growing number of vulnerable groups, including aboriginals and people
struggling to make ends meet on social assistance. It says the strategy
should spell out the levels of responsibility between federal,
provincial and municipal governments.

The problem is that Harper's policies make such a strategy unlikely:

The report
essentially serves as De Schutter's rebuttal to the bitter and personal
public criticism he faced from Harper cabinet ministers during his
11-day fact finding visit to Canada last May.

The Harperites will not be happy. There will be a storm of disdain from Ottawa. And our international reputation will continue to erode.

That puts someone like Sen. Mike Duffy in a bizarre position. Duffy has
acknowledged that he doesn’t live in Prince Edward Island, the province
he was appointed to represent. That’s why he’s repaying more than
$42,000 in housing allowances that he received to defray the costs of
his suburban Ottawa home (which, Duffy admits, is where he actually does
live.

All the rules require, says Marjory LeBreton, is that a senator own property in a province. By that logic, any absentee landowner can be a senator. Lebreton's statement is a broadside against what an adviser to George W. Bush called "the reality based community." The truth is what I say it is:

In effect, as Conservative Senate leader Marjory LeBreton explained to
reporters Thursday, senators are deemed to live wherever they say they
live — at least for the purpose of collecting their $132,300 sessional
salaries.

No one is accusing any senators of fraud. But this government is most certainly accusing E.I recipients of that crime. And, when they discover that fraud, rest assured that the offenders will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Oh, the privileges of power. You get to make the rules, then declare who is breaking them.

Saturday, March 02, 2013

The Harperites will troll for votes wherever they can find them. That includes immigrant communities. But, at their core, they fear "the other" -- those who don't see the world as they do. That attitude is most evident in their attitude toward refugees and their access to health care.

Carol Goar writes, in The Toronto Star, that a group of Canadian doctors and lawyers have decided to confront the Conservatives on their policy of denying healthcare to refugees:

This week, Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care and the Canadian
Association of Refugee Lawyers joined forces to ask the Federal Court to
declare the government’s action unconstitutional. To provide real-life
evidence, they were joined by three men
— Daniel Garcia Rodriguez of Colombia, Ahmad Awatt of Iraq and Hanif
Ayubi of Afghanistan — who escaped persecution in their home countries
only to be denied life-saving drugs and treatment in Canada.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney saw the action as a mere annoyance:

Kenney brushed off
the court challenge summarily. “This is a dog-bites-man story,” he told
reporters in Ottawa. “We have no legal, moral, political obligation to
give taxpayer services to bogus asylum seekers, rejected claimants —
people who are effectively illegal migrants.”

Like Tom Flanagan, he refuses to see the victims his opinions create. But the doctors and lawyers know medicine and the law, subjects on which Kenney -- a university drop out -- is ignorant:

Dr. Meb Rashid, who heads the Crossroads Clinic for Refugees
at Women’s College Hospital, made the medical case. “This is far below
the standard any physician would hope to provide to his or her
patients,” he said. “Ultimately these reductions will cost the
health-care system as much or more in emergency care — and have already
caused a great deal of suffering.”

Lorne Waldman,
lead counsel, made the legal case. “It is also far below the standard
any democratic country should provide for refugee claimants or any other
human being under their jurisdiction,” he said. “These cuts are
inconsistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and
Canada’s international obligations under the UN Refugee Convention.”

Once again, the Conservatives are coming to another reckoning with the Supreme Court. Each time that happens, they wind up on the short end. They're simply not very bright.

Friday, March 01, 2013

The word on the street is the Harper government has informed Washington that, if it doesn't approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, there will be a catastrophic rupture in Canadian-American relations -- "the biggest deep freeze in Canada-U.S. relations ever."

Now, there's a threat which must have caused panic in Washington. Iran is going nuclear, North Korea is going ballistic, and Canada is going -- blue. If the U.S. doesn't want our sticky oil, what are we to do? It's looking more and more like the pipeline to Kitimat is a non-starter. Perhaps the Harperites will have to settle for a pipeline to New Brunswick. Lawrence Martin writes:

The days of Canada having the handy U.S. market to take care of almost
all of its energy exports are over. As observers like our former
American ambassador Frank McKenna have been pointing out for a long
time, market diversification is now the paramount priority. Though a
Keystone rejection certainly would be unwelcome, it would help stir a
move in that direction. It would hasten pressures to build the
infrastructure to transport energy resources to our east coast.

Wouldn't that be the National Energy Program with a new name? Call it Canada's Economic Action Plan. Consider the irony. It's of Greek proportions. A prime minister is pathologicically committed to destroying the Liberal Party of Canada. In his manical quest, he manages to re-institute the very program which the man he reviled first conceived. And, then, the son of that man is elected leader of the Liberal Party.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.